1. In the arts, particularly literature and the visual arts, it refers to the nineteenth-century movement that was the precursor to modernism. It called itself realism because it broke with the artistic conventions of the times and challenged the accepted view of what art should be, namely the pursuit of the beautiful, the moral, and the improving, and instead claimed that it should try to record and, where necessary, indict what is. In art this was achieved by means of heightened verisimilitude in representation, while in literature it was achieved by exploring the inner motivations of characters, who were drawn from everyday life. 2. In philosophy, the position that the only acceptable argument, idea, or theorem, is one that can be verified independently of a subjective observer. It is premised on the view that the world exists and is not an artefact of the mind (as an extreme relativism might argue), nor simply an effect of language. Its goal is to describe the world as accurately as possible in objective terms. It tends to align itself very closely with mathematics and the physical sciences. Since not all phenomena are verifiable by mind-independent means, this position is ultimately very limited in what it can deal with.